Kitchenalia

Claire, over at 20somethingmum, did a great blog post about how she loves kitchenalia. I love kitchenalia too. I’ve thought about a blog post like this for a long time. Claire’s made me go ahead and do it.

So, why am I so in love with kitchenalia? Simple, it makes life a whole lots easier. And more fun. I love baking and cooking. But I didn’t do it as often as I do now. The reason being I didn’t have good appliances. The last combi microwave we had didn’t a good job with the oven. It left cakes and pies raw on the inside. So I didn’t make them.

When we got married my mom let me choose a wedding gift. I had been looking at a new combi microwave for quiet some time, but the prices put me off. When my mom offered I chose one that could do everything I wanted it to, for a modest budget. I chose the Whirlpool JT 379 IX. I wanted one with a ovenlike door. I wanted one that was easy and came with a lot of functions. I wanted a big one, that could easily hold a pie, a cake or one of my giant pizzas. This one could do all of that. Admittedly, I didn’t pay nearly as much as they are selling for on Amazon. And I bought it earlier then the date first available Amazon gives. Which is a bit weird, but there you go. I still think it’s a great buy!

My second gadget that I can’t live without anymore is my food processor. I’ve bought one for my birthday some years ago now and I’ve been using it a lot. It’s the Kenwood FP 736. It came with a lot of attachments. I haven’t been using all of them, but I do use many attachments a lot. There’s three downsides with this food processor. One is the speed. Even the slow speed is quite speedy(…) and that makes it hard to use sometimes. For instance, if I’m making pizza dough, the flower is almost exploding inside the bowl. You can’t start mixing it slowly. There’s no slow speed on it. The second thing is the cleaning. It has a lot of fiddly edges and this makes it harder to clean. The third thing is the rocking when it’s turned on. You see chefs walking away from their machines all the time on tv. Just don’t try that with this one. Stay near it or it will walk off your countertop!
But these things are small compared to what it can do and what it does. I love it and wouldn’t miss it for the world!

The last thing that has made my life better is actually very simple… It’s an oven mitt. I’ve been having problems in the past with many oven mitts. The Ikea ones were quite good, but not similar in size. Also, they lacked lots of stitching and were quite easy to set on fire…
I then bought some nice ones from an el cheapo shop. These were set on fire the very next day and resulted in some minor, first degree burns on both hands.
The next pair did relatively good until they needed a wash. it ruined them. After that I’d been searching for a good pair, but apparently there’s not a whole lot of reviews on oven mitts… Jay offered me to buy a pair of Flame Guard Flame Retardant Quilted Oven Mitts. At first I wasn’t too sure, especially since they’re quite long. But as I’ve had problems with bear arms touching the inside of a hot oven in the past I said yes. And they work great. They’re quite thick, making it much easier to hold hot stuff. Before, most oven mitts were still getting very hot on the inside. You don’t have to worry about that with these. They will stay cool for a long period. They don’t seem to catch on fire as quickly as some of the others I’ve had. The only downside is their thickness. It makes it hard to keep hold of things like pan lids. But I’d rather have trouble getting hold of a lid than burn my hands (again).